Watching the disaster unfold: geographies of engagement with live-streamed extreme weather

The project examines how emerging digital technologies with live-streaming capabilities are generating new opportunities to engage with extreme weather (including floods, storms and hurricanes). Recent floods in New Zealand (where a man died while live-streaming on his phone) and the United States (where viewers of a YouTube stream directed emergency services to a casualty) have demonstrated that streaming technologies are increasingly connected to the experience and management of extreme events.

Yet, while some research has charted diverse motivations for live-stream production and consumption in other contexts, no research has explored how live-streams mediate experiences of extreme events or the motivations for, and geographies of, viewership. Additionally, no research has examined how live-streaming may be wrapped up in new forms of risk governance, or how such visual imageries may be affording new opportunities to engage with (potentially catastrophically) changing places. In short, nothing is known about the impacts of live-streaming in the extreme weather context.

This lack of understanding is important given two different - but interlinked - domains where an increase in the provision and utilisation of live-streamed footage is observed. First, there is evidence of local authorities increasingly using live video to communicate changing environmental conditions, often during floods. Footage is now shared on government websites and the Environment Agency (UK) is exploring streaming infrastructures to this end.

The roll-out of these technologies is underpinned by a currently unevidenced assumption that visual depictions of conditions improves citizen decision-making. Second, there is evidence of internet users repurposing live-video infrastructure (commonly on YouTube) to witness extreme weather. Here, webcams (such as 'beach cams') are repurposed to become spaces of hazard engagement where citizens witness the developing event.

Initial observations suggest that these streams are used for sense-checking purposes - with government risk guidance discussed in comment spaces - however further research is required. At the very least, in both domains, live-streaming technologies are enabling viewers to engage with the 'unfoldingness' of events in ways not previously possible.

In response, the project aim is to generate understandings of the factors shaping both engagement with live-streamed extreme weather and the impacts of engagement in both abovementioned domains. Specifically, informed by poststructuralist notions of digital witnessing, the project questions how live visual content enables viewers to make sense of (potentially catastrophically) changing places.

The project adopts a two-strand multi-scalar approach that enables production and consumption spaces to be examined. The first strand includes a global review of the use of live-streaming and video footage in hazard warning systems (including interviews with state 'hazard hub' designers). The second strand utilises a novel community-based methodology through the establishment of live-streaming infrastructure in the high-flooding-risk coastal Devon town of Brixham (in collaboration with the Prospect Brixham - a Data Trust pilot organisation).

In doing so, the research will produce urgently needed evidence to inform government investment on the design of new extreme weather communication systems. This evidence will advise Environment Agency decision-making on the creation of new 'hazard hubs' in the UK. Furthermore, the novel community-based methodology will provide both data and infrastructure that supports Prospect Brixham's aim of examining climate sense-making in coastal communities.

Lastly, the project will provide the first exploration of live-streaming in the extreme weather context - contributing new knowledge to a range of disciplinary fields (including human/digital geography and disaster sociology).